Historically, vending machines (VM) and other remote point of sale (PoS) terminals were required to be intelligent and self-sufficient devices that could operate autonomously. This was a simple task back in the era of electro-mechanical based vending operations combined with simple coin acceptance. However, there have been several new trends in this industry that have served to make these systems much more complicated. Examples of these are the inclusion of wireless networking devices such as general packet radio service (GPRS) or Wi-Fi modems, industry standard inventory and exception reporting such as data exchange (DEX), multiple-product/multiple-package/multiple-price options that require configuration of the machine. Probably the most complicating factor has been the emergence of the cashless vending model. This single aspect has caused the complexity and security of a VM to basically match that of a remote teller machine such as an ATM in order to protect consumer credit card information.
This increasing complexity does provide useful advanced functionality for the machine but at the cost of significantly increasing the capital equipment and recurring management costs for VMs while at the same time reducing the mean time between failures. In addition, the VM manufacturers must develop new machine types to keep up with the feature demands. This causes obsolescence of existing machines and requires significant new capital expenditure by the operators to bring new features into an existing market.